Gaming Companies Think You're An Idiot

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]Valve has just announced a massive price hike for the Steam Deck, and it's got me very worried about the future of this industry, but we'll get to that bit. For now, let's go over exactly what's changed with this machine. So, Valve has actually announced that their console is going up by as much as $300.

[00:00:21]That's not me saying that the Steam Deck is retailing for $300. That's not me saying that the Steam Deck is going up by $30. This is a $300 price increase, at least for the 1 TBTE version of the console, which is jumping up from its standard price of $649 to $949.

[00:00:45]Don't think the cheaper options are getting away scot-free either because the 512 GBTE version of the Steam Deck is increasing from $549 to $689.

[00:00:58]So better, but still an increase of $140 quid. And also before my fellow Brits shout at me in the comments section, I'm just going to use dollars for ease of use. Take it up with our audience who are mostly from the US. I know, I know.

[00:01:12]I'm a traitor. So what the heck is going on? Why has Valve, seemingly out of nowhere, announced such a massive price hike to a machine that's already been out for a good while? Well, call me Siller Black because surprise surprise, it once again comes down to the fact that the components for these machines are more costly than they've ever been.

[00:01:32]As per their official communications as written up by The Verge, Valve has once again pointed towards the rising cost of storage and memory when it comes to making hardware. and we're going to get into it, but this is the primary reason as to why the likes of Xboxes and PlayStations and even Nintendo Switches have increased in price across this generation rather than, you know, falling and being sold for a discount.

[00:01:57]Valve said, quote, "These new prices reflect the current state of component costs and other global logistical challenges across the industry as a whole. We'll keep you updated if anything changes." Oh, great. Thanks, man. You'll keep me updated if anything changes. I'm sure the next time you'll tell me about changes is when you're increasing the price even more if history has anything to go by. Like I said, that's already happened with PlayStation, who has increased the price of its hardware twice across the generations so far. And look, I'm not trying to undermine the very real problem that is happening in the tech world right now. shortages of these components and the price of these components because they're being prioritized by AI data farms that are buying everything up and driving the cost up is a real issue. It is ultimately making these pieces of hardware more costly to produce from the distributors. Now, Valve has already buted heads against this issue and announced that their upcoming Steam machine has been delayed indefinitely.

[00:02:59]It was supposed to get a solid 2026, early 2026 release date, but that's been pushed. They still say that it's going to arrive at some point within the next year, but again, because of the logistical challenges and current market issues. Who really knows? And honestly, I've had one worry over the past year, let's say, that's been solidified with this news in particular, and that is gaming is just genuinely a proper luxury hobby. Now, let's look at some of the numbers. Like I said, this increase follows a major price increase over on PlayStation's side of things. The PS5 has risen from $499 in 2020 to a whopping $649 at the time of recording. The PS5 digital, the cheaper version, has risen from $399 to again $599.

[00:03:52]That is significantly more than the better model the regular PS5 retailed for even when it launched. And my beloved PlayStation 5 Pro, despite only coming out a few years ago, has not been impervious either. It already retailed initially at an eyewatering $699 and now goes for, and I'm going to double check this to make sure I'm not wrong, $899.

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[00:05:14]If you want to grab this for yourself before it expires, just follow the link in the description or scan the QR code on screen. I don't know where it is cuz I didn't edit this ad read. I just hosted it. And look, like I said, this is a real issue that all of these companies are dealing with. They probably did have to raise costs somewhere when it came to hardware production if they didn't want to fall behind and lose money hand over fist. I don't personally like that. I do think there are ways that they could have taken this crisis headon and not just passed the cost down to the consumer primarily because we haven't seen an increase in value from the PlayStation or from the Steam Deck since it initially launched. They aren't promising us better features or better infrastructure or even better games or quicker games or anything like that.

[00:06:02]You're not getting more value for your money elsewhere whilst eating the cost so they can put the prices up. And what makes me downright furious, to be fair, is that this isn't exactly an isolated incident and could very easily be viewed by someone cynical like me as them simply using a real life crisis as an excuse to fleece more from their customer base. I mean, chip shortages can only explain the price hikes to a degree. They don't explain the massive price increases that we've seen elsewhere across the gaming industry.

[00:06:34]They don't explain why some publishers are now charging as much as $80 for a new release just because they can. It doesn't explain why the standard price for a AAA release has become increasingly $70 either when it was just 60 in the previous generation. It doesn't explain why Sony has constantly increased the price of its subscription services despite giving you no more value for that money. It's just raising the prices because it can raise the prices because of global logistics. It also doesn't explain why the cost of games on digital platforms are way more expensive than the physical versions of that same game that you can find in stores. For instance, recently I just picked up Lego Batman Legacy of the Dark Knight on physical disc because the price discrepancy between going to a store and actually buying something that I would own versus buying it on a digital platform where the distributor, in this case Sony, doesn't have to pay any third-party fees or the stores that are selling the product because there it was so much more expensive. In fact, and I'm going to have to use pounds in the UK as an example now because I don't know how it is anywhere else. In the UK, I ended up buying Lego Batman for £47.

[00:07:54]And that's kind of the standard price if you want to get this game on disc from a real life store. That same game, that same edition with the same bells and whistles was $59.99 Great British pounds if I bought it straight up on PlayStation Store. There is no excuse for that. There is genuinely no way I can wrap my head around that decision. Like I said, not only is this game more expensive on Sony's platform despite them not having the same overhead costs to put it on there, they're also taking a bigger cut of that pie as well, and all the money is going straight to them. They're doing it because they've got a captive audience because most people buy digitally and again because they can.

[00:08:38]That has nothing to do with the price of their hardware going up. And like I said, neither do subscriptions. I'm going to run down some of these numbers now. Um, Essential has gone from $59 per year to $79 per year. Extra has gone up from $99 per year to $139 per year. And premium has gone up from $119 per year to $159 per year. And that's not even taking into account the price rises that they just announced recently which only apply to one month and three month subscriptions because those have gone up as well. So where the hell are we at? I just personally do not think there is any justifying such massive increases like this across the board. And now Google has for some reason signed me out of my notes because they must have heard me slagging all of this stuff off. And we can't have that now can they? That's a joke by the way. That's not a real conspiracy theory. I'm just uh lazy and didn't properly sign in. There we go.

[00:09:36]For years, we've had a debate about the value of games when the price point was increased from the static for decades $60 price point in the previous generations to 70 and now 80 across the past 6 years or so. A lot of people on the internet argued, well, it's been a long time coming. The price of games has never increased with inflation, so it was never going to be $60 forever. And I have a few thoughts on that. One, guess what else hasn't really increased with inflation over the past few decades?

[00:10:09]Wages. And two, studios didn't raise the price of games, not out of the goodness of their heart, not because they were taking a hit on our behalf, but because they found other revenue streams that kind of allowed them to charge us more for games, just not in the conventional sense, just not in the upfront cost.

[00:10:30]That of course comes in the form of microtransactions which if you look at any revenue data from these big companies often takes up the vast majority of their revenue every single year way more than the standard actual price of a game gets them or god forbid hardware gets them. You've got DLCs.

[00:10:50]You've got all of the subscriptions that I've mentioned. You've got all of these ways. You've got the digital thing where they take a bigger cut out of that $60 or $70. anyway circumventing the need to raise the prices regardless. You've got all of these situations and all of these revenue streams now where they're getting more money than they ever have before. And at the same time, they're now saying, "Oh, also we're raising the prices of these games. We're raising the prices of the hardware. We're raising the prices of all of those different revenue streams that I've mentioned."

[00:11:24]And as I've been thinking about all of this recently, it got me thinking about another video that I'd seen on YouTube about the way Las Vegas is run in the modern day. And this was from a channel called More Perfect Union. And I'm not massively familiar with their work, but this video I found really interesting.

[00:11:41]They essentially lay out the argument looking at the financial approaches of all of the casinos and companies in Vegas as well as interviewing people who actually live there and came to the conclusion that Vegas doesn't care about getting everyone through its doors and offering a service for everyone.

[00:11:59]Instead, it's starting to focus more on the upper 1% of people who visit and trying to get as much money out of those people as possible. And I can't help but think that exact thing is happening in the world of gaming. And again, it's not even like it's new. A decade ago, maybe even more, we were complaining about the fact that companies were openly bragging about players being whales. And if you're lucky enough to not know what that industry term is, essentially a whale is a player who spends more time and money in one particular game than the average person. So, it's someone who is buying V-Bucks every single month, spending thousands of dollars on recurrent revenue streams in a game rather than someone who plays it more casually and might have spent no extra money on that game after they bought it or never paid anything at all, as is often the case in free-to-play games.

[00:12:53]The focus on these whales was horrific then and it's even more horrific now.

[00:12:58]And that's how it feels, at least in my opinion, to be a gaming fan in the modern era. It is a luxury hobby. It's always been a luxury hobby, but now it's at the point where it's pricing out a lot of people who could afford it and now couldn't. Obviously, a lot of the stuff that I mentioned could be seen as optional, the subscriptions, the microtransactions, the DLC. But now we're at a point where consoles cost so much money because of real life factors driving up the price as do the actual games as does the actual hardware like controllers that we need to just play a basic console game. And I think that's just such a shame. I got into this industry because there were affordable ways to get into it. I could never get a console at launch, but I was able to get one a few years down the line secondhand. I was able to buy cheaper games secondhand. Now that market has been killed off and I just know if this was happening when I was younger, I would have literally been priced out of this industry. I wouldn't have been able to enjoy as I have so much and do every day this hobby, this art form that we all love. We're at a point now, and this is my theory, where these changes are going to affect sales. We know that recently Sony announced that sales were 50% down year on year in part because they put the price of the machines and the software up to a place that is prohibitive for a lot of people in the current climate. Like I obviously haven't even talked about the current climate. It's not like games are the only thing going up in price. My rent, for instance, has increased almost double across the past four years alone.

[00:14:39]And I know I'm not alone in that. I know prices for groceries are going up, prices for gas is going up, prices, the cost of living is astronomical. And we are long beyond the point where it's acceptable for a studio to say, "Hey, if you want to play a PlayStation, you'll get a second job for it. People already have second jobs, pal, and they still can't afford it." And I worry that when you see these numbers, it might be exactly what executives want. They know that they are pricing some people out, but they also know that people like myself will pay this premium price to keep enjoying the thing that they love, to keep engaging with an art form they adore and an ecosystem that they've already bought into. And ultimately, we will foot the bill. We will say thank you. We don't expect anything more. And that is the reality. At least currently, we're in the situation where more and more these companies are starting to only focus on a certain percentage of players they know will be recurrent spenders. They know will be whales. And before I bo on my soap box, I just want to tell you one more story that it reminds me of. When I was about 18, I scrimped and saved because I wanted to go to a posh restaurant. you know, one of those 100 quid ahead. Um, set meal, not a Michelin star, but, you know, small small plates, nice presentation.

[00:15:59]And I always wanted to taste what that was like. And I scrimped and I saved and eventually went out to one of these meals after looking forward to it. And came away with the saddening realization that it was not worth the money that I spent. I'm sure it was delicious. I enjoyed my time, but the absolute crazy price that I paid could have got me groceries for a few weeks, right? And I had this realization afterwards that the restaurant actually didn't care if I thought that I got my money's worth.

[00:16:30]They didn't really care if I thought it was good value because I wasn't the target audience. The target audience for that restaurant wasn't people like me who were scrimping and were saving and then went to that restaurant one time in their life and maybe would have gone back in another two or 3 years. They were targeting a clientele who could afford that kind of meal just on a random week night who wouldn't even think about the price who saw that price as their baseline and not as I did as my ceiling. And I don't want to get into that position with games. to someone from a workingclass background. I don't want games to be someone else's flaw that you can't even get in the house of.

[00:17:10]All right, my analogies are getting all over the place. I know I've been on one now, but it's just it's been a long time coming and I want to know what you guys think down in the comments below. Am I over exaggerating things here? Are you fine with the price hikes or are you in a similar situation as to me? Like I said, go check out Sai's video as well on how AI comes into play in all of this.